Many types of hazardous wastes, such as toxic or radioactive wastes, are produced every year. Many of these wastes include components which could be employed as feed to a regenerator furnace for forming useful chemical products. Such wastes include organic, inorganic, organometallic and radioactive materials. Examples of wastes containing potential feed components for a regenerator furnace include coke wastes, petroleum residuals, inner tubes, tires, polyvinyl chlorides, chlorobenzenes, polychlorinated biphenyls, teflon, pesticides, spent sulfuric acid, and uranium hexafluoride.
Currently, many of these wastes are disposed of in landfills or by incineration. However, disposal of wastes in landfills and by incineration has become an increasingly difficult problem because of diminishing availability of disposal space, strengthened governmental regulations, and the growing public awareness of the impact of hazardous substance contamination upon the environment. Release of hazardous wastes to the environment can contaminate air and water supplies thereby diminishing the quality of life in the affected populations.
Furthermore, disposal of these wastes without separating out valuable components or producing valuable products constitutes an economic loss of valuable chemical constituents. Thus, some of these wastes have been converted in chemical process furnaces to generate useful products, such as sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid and hydrofluoric acid. However, the types of wastes previously processed by the chemical process furnaces have been limited to gasifiable wastes containing little ash-forming or metallic species. Processing impure wastes, such as those containing non-gasifiable components, has typically resulted in the fouling and loss of efficiency of chemical process furnaces, necessitating furnace down-time for removal of impurities deposited in the furnace.
To minimize the environmental and economic effects associated with the disposal of wastes, and to overcome the inability of current chemical process furnaces to process wastes containing non-gasifiable impurities, methods must be developed to convert these wastes into benign substances and/or useful substances.